Today we record impressions from our first-time – shame! – visit to the home of the UK’s most famously funky ‘three-star’ chef, Heston Blumenthal OBE. From London, take the Maidenhead train and then a ten-minute cab ride. If you’re going to spend this much money – and, make no mistake, you are – you might as well not have to worry about driving home afterwards. Your destination is a sweet little cottage, in the heart of a super-swanky village. Well, it must have been sweet once: now it’s been re-engineered to Michelin-pleasing standards, so, for example, the air conditioning can chill you to the bone even on one of the hottest days of the hottest July. On a weekday lunchtime, you may find yourself wondering where the other guests come from. Well, a quarter of them will probably be Japanese – courtesy of those precious stars from the tyre men – and the rest an odd miscellany. All very casual: is this what Thames Valley millionaires look like? And then, you’ll probably opt for the famous tasting menu. There will follow a procession of little dishes, some remarkable, some less so (especially the over-famous snail porridge). On our mental score cards, we both awarded – on average – about 7/10 overall. That’s not necessarily an adverse criticism: you can’t expect laboratory rats to like everything they’re given. You may observe that we’ve ‘ducked’ out of awarding one of our five-star ratings today, as the only real test you can really apply to a place as odd-ball as this is the binary one: ‘would you go-back?’ Oddly enough, we think we might – if we won the Lottery or something – if only to try some of the somewhat more conventional dishes from the à la carte menu. That, we are told, is what the people who eat here all the time do.
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